739435 - Camino is printing blanks or nothing at all - suddenly

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Camino Graveyard :: Printing, defect)

Description

[Stuart J. Allyn]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en; rv:1.9.2.28) Gecko/20120308 Camino/2.1.2 (like Firefox/3.6.28)
Build ID: 20120308211433

Steps to reproduce:

I wanted to print shipping labels from UPS.com as I have hundreds of times in the past with no problem.  I printed some earlier today with no problem then suddenly, nothing would print,  I quit and restarted Camino, same results.  I rebooted both my computer and my printer, same results.  Printing from Firefox worked just fine.


Actual results:

If I tried preview it was a blank page, if I tried to print to PDF it was a blank page, If I tried to print to my color laser, it would be put "on hold" in the print que and the print que would then abort it if I tried to force it to print.
Indeed any webpage that I now try to print gives me a blank page.


Expected results:

it should have printed my labels and my receipts.  it should print webpages.

Comment 1

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to Stuart J. Allyn from comment #0)
> Printing from Firefox worked just fine.

Which version of Firefox? You should test 3.6 just to be sure.

> Indeed any webpage that I now try to print gives me a blank page.

This sounds like something has gone awry with your print settings, especially since it came on so suddenly and affects everything. You should probably clear your page setup prefs and re-launch Camino and see if the problem persists. (Testing with a fresh profile will also accomplish this.)

Comment 2

[Stuart J. Allyn]

I used the newest version of Firefox for Mac and that works just fine.b I reset Camino, emptied the cache, rebooted everything, flushed all caches, and Camino will not print.  I tried printing to 4 different printers, plus preview, plus PDF. Everything is either blank or fails.  Very odd.

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I'll say it again: you should test Firefox 3.6 for the comparison to be valid, as Firefox 11 and Camino use two totally different Gecko versions.

Reset Camino won't clear page setup prefs.

Comment 4

[philippe (part-time)]

Do you see any related messages in Console (Applications/Utilities/Console - fileter for Camino) ?

Comment 5

[Stuart J. Allyn]

(In reply to philippe from comment #4)
> Do you see any related messages in Console (Applications/Utilities/Console -
> fileter for Camino) ?

No I do not even know how to do that, nor what it would mean if I did.

Comment 6

[Stuart J. Allyn]

(In reply to Chris Lawson from comment #3)
> I'll say it again: you should test Firefox 3.6 for the comparison to be
> valid, as Firefox 11 and Camino use two totally different Gecko versions.
> 
> Reset Camino won't clear page setup prefs.

I do not have Firefox 3.6 nor have I had it for some time.  I do not even know if will run currently.  So How does one reset the page set-up prefs other than choosing another page and printer (which I have done)?

Comment 7

[Stuart J. Allyn]

So, going to another user and a clean install of Camino things work as expected.  Therefore I guess something got corrupted.  Question is what?  As I do not have the time to track down every possibility, I copied the Application support folder from the new user and replaced everything that matched in the original user app support folder except for bookmarks.  This now works, preview works, printing works all is well.  Why should this happen?  why can't "reset" actually reset things like this?  why should this happen in the first place?

Comment 8

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

You can still download Firefox 3.6 from ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6.28/mac/en-US/ (assuming you want it in US English).

The best way I know of to reset the page setup prefs short of throwing out your entire prefs is to quit Camino, open 

~/Library/Application Support/Camino/prefs.js

in your favourite text editor, and delete any lines that start with

user_pref("print.

In particular, the one that starts with

user_pref("print.macosx.pagesetup-2"

is probably what's broken here, so you could try just deleting that whole line (the one line is about three pages in my file). Make sure you delete all the way to, and including, the next semicolon.

Once you've done that, save the changes, close the file, and re-launch Camino.

Comment 9

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

(In reply to Stuart J. Allyn from comment #7)
> So, going to another user and a clean install of Camino things work as
> expected.  Therefore I guess something got corrupted.  Question is what?

As noted above, our best guess so far is that something in your page setup prefs broke. It's probably going to be impossible to determine exactly why (or, short of a lot of effort, specifically *what* broke).

> happen?  why can't "reset" actually reset things like this?  why should this

I've filed bug 739651 for investigating this idea further. I don't know that Reset Camino is necessarily the right place for it, but it could be. (Reset Camino does not generally mess with user preferences.)

Comment 10

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Not really INVALID, since ideally page-setup prefs would never get corrupted and we'd find a way to fail gracefully if they did, but without a way to know exactly what went wrong or how to detect it, there's not much we can do with this bug other than WORKSFORME.